Here’s what I like to think of when I think of Margaret Thatcher: the Thatcher Effect, an important demonstration of how the brain encodes information about facial perception. Turn the eyes and mouth of a human face upside-down, then turn the resulting face as a whole upside down again, and we barely notice that anything is wrong. (The smile and the look of the eyes look right to us.) It’s not until the face is once again turned right-side-up that we see how horrifying and unsettling it is.

I’m not sure why Peter Thompson, the experimental psychologist who discovered the Thatcher effect and first published it in 1980, chose her as his model for it other than that she had only recently been elected Prime Minister, but he could have hardly chosen a better person in terms of the metaphor. She turned things upside-down, much of the public didn’t notice it, and the horrifying results didn’t become horrifyingly obvious until things turned right-side-up again.

Margaret Thatcher was the middle (and most potent) of the triple whammy of elected leaders — Menachem Begin in 1977, Thatcher in 1979, Ronald Reagan in 1980 — that shoved the world into an era of irresponsible economics and foreign policy that, were I conservative, I would want to argue had been mislabeled as “conservative.” She was the smartest, the hardest-working, and in some ways the most effective and pernicious. Her secret, in economics, was to cover up what she was doing and to hope that no significant proportion of the population would ever figure it out. More than anyone, even Reagan, she created the ideology of modern America.

The secrets?

(1) Loot the commonweal (a lovely word, the basis for “commonwealth,” for the public resources of a society) and give lots of people a tiny share of it — while a tiny share got lots of it.

(2) Cut taxes and social services, then use the ensuing desperation of those with few resources, and now without public aid, to bid down the cost of labor and raise the cost of dissent.

(3) Emasculate those who question unlimited spending on defense, both international military and intranational policing, while enriching those who provide such services at inflated rates.

(4) Pretend to be economically sound — as if one could ward off the inevitable deficits by continuing to sell off public wealth to private interests indefinitely, as if the oil and the buildings and parking meters such never run out,

Very simple, very effective. Ultimately, very successful. (After all, how much of this sort of thing are you reading today as people mark her death?)

If you look at what we see as scandals in Orange County and beyond, you’ll find Thatcherism at the root of many of them. Selling public resources into private hands (like they tried to do with the Fairgrounds), letting the homeless languish without the benefit of public services except for the tender mercies of the police, justifying the boosting of private interests because through our retirement accounts so many of us own an infinitesimal piece of that prosperity — all of this was considered outside of the political mainstream before the triple whammy of Begin (who changed much of the sympathies of the American Jewish community from kibbutznik-style Israeli socialism to Netanyahu-style Romneyism), Thatcher (who did her best to cripple and sell off Britain’s Public Health system), and Reagan (who, as Cheney said, “proved to us that deficits don’t matter” — because eventually Democrats would come into office and take the blame.)

I found a nice takedown of Thatcher on the web (through Yahoo UK, of all places) that I think is worth sharing:

I always wonder why people who did not live through the dictatorship years of Thatcher still answer these type of questions. All they know is what they have been told and most of what they were told is the same lies and propaganda that is told by newspapers like the daily Mail. Poppycock!

Thatcher was a dictator, a tyrant of a leader whose own MP’s were scared to death of. They knew that if they disagreed with her or tried to go against anything she wanted, they would be at best demoted, at worst given the sack immediately. She considered herself to be irreplaceable and thought that her tenancy in Downing street would never be challenged. It took a brave Tory to challenge her in the end after the disastrous Poll Tax caused far worse riots in the cities than the recent riots we had in the UK.

She caused boom and bust economies that devastated families and turned communities into ghost towns. Greed was the order of the day and this came from America, with whom she had a very close Relationship with Ronald Reagan. She pulled every trick in the book to prevent workers striking. Encouraged them to buy their council homes and prevented councils from building new ones with the proceeds, hence the affordable housing shortage today. Once people had bought their council homes, they had a mortgage which they feared losing if they went on strike for better conditions. She created that situation and she did not crush the unions at all, apart from the miners, whose industry she decimated.

Someone mentioned North Sea Oil and how she made billions from it. Wrong again I’m afraid. The billions that were earned from North Sea Oil were totally wasted in the payment of unemployment benefits to the 3.5 million she threw onto the scrap heap. A whole generation of young people were wasted. See how Cameron today is following in her footsteps and a further generation of young people are left on the scrap heap with no hope of a job. She created despair and a feeling of hopelessness among millions of working class families who having bought their council house found that it was worth less than the mortgage they had taken out to buy it. Rampant inflation and sky high interest rates of 17% were enough to put many unfortunate families out on the street as they struggled to pay their mortgages.

Hospitals and schools were left to wreck and ruin. Waiting lists were often 2 years or more. Doctors, nurses, dentists and teachers were scarce and they had to be brought in from abroad. There was no minimum wage and people worked up to 60 hours a week for a miserable £1 per hour.

That was what the Thatcher years were like. Not the utopia that other Tory supporters think they lived in during her reign. The greed and selfish society we have today is a direct result of her policies. Britain may have been poorer before she came to power, but we were a lot happier, that’s for certain.

“De nisi mortis bonum” — say nothing but good of the dead — the saying goes. I don’t think I’m violating that; Thatcher herself — as a woman in a man’s world, as a merchant’s daughter clawing her way up in a party of fatuous elites — had many admirable qualities. It’s not Thatcher I speak of today, it’s Thatcherism. And I mourn not because she’s dead, but because it isn’t.

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose worker's rights and government accountability attorney, residing in northwest Brea. General Counsel of CATER, the Coalition of Anaheim Taxpayers for Economic Responsibility, a non-partisan group of people sick of local corruption.
Deposed as Northern Vice Chair of DPOC in April 2014 when his anti-corruption and pro-consumer work in Anaheim infuriated the Building Trades and Teamsters in spring 2014, who then worked with the lawless and power-mad DPOC Chair to eliminate his internal oversight.
Occasionally runs for office to challenge some nasty incumbent who would otherwise run unopposed. (Someday he might pick a fight with the intent to win rather than just dent someone. You'll know it when you see it.) He got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012 and in 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002.
None of his pre-putsch writings ever spoke for the Democratic Party at the local, county, state, national, or galactic level, nor do they now.
A family member co-owns a business offering campaign treasurer services to Democratic candidates and the odd independent. He is very proud of her. He doesn't directly profit from her work and it doesn't affect his coverage. (He does not always favor her clients, though she might hesitate to take one that he truly hated.)
He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.)

59 Comments

Thatcher and Reagan were decent people, but they got poisoned by radicals when they got into power. Thatcher and Reagan were decent on LGBT equality at the time, but in the 1980s the values crusaders ended up making them into rather evil insensitive folk.

There are more issues in the world than LGBT equality and how well one treats one friends interpersonally. I’m happy that neither kicked puppies. As leaders, they did their best to wreck responsible governance in the expectation that before too long people either would not realize what they were doing or would no longer blame them for it. For the most part, it worked.

I remember a news commentator (Tom Brokaw?)saying, near the end of the Reagan administration, that Mr. Reagan created the policy that would throw your grandmother out of her house in the middle of winter, and would be the first person to give her his sweater, while seeing no conflict between the two. Being a nice person does not mean you are a great leader.

You understand that these are fighting words. When I come out of my protracted period of deep mourning, we shall face each other with pistols at dawn. Oh yeah, liberals don’t want us playing with guns anymore. Hmm….clipboards holding strongly worded petitions at dawn. That may work. By the way, the dog says she is disappointed in you, she thought you had developed a connection and here you go dissing her namesake. I would be careful of your shoes during the next dinner party.

Your wonderful dog, on that dark day when she departs this vale of tears, would be a deserving recipient of a British state funeral — or at a minimum more so then Lady Thatcher.

Look at it this way, Cynthia — if we agreed on such things it would be hard to characterize our other agreements as bipartisan. In a show of friendship, though, I will agree to let you shoot me in the fleshy part of the buttocks — but can I get you to use something like a sandbag?

Yes dearest comrade, the sign of genuine friendship is to agree to disagree and still care about each other. In light of my respect and admiration for your principled (if lefty) heart, I promise to use only non-lethal rounds. And yes, Maggie the world’s most fabulous corgi would certainly have earned a State funeral, with all the pomp and circumstance we might muster up here in the colonies (although I would prefer to go first frankly) Wonder if APD would let me borrow the equestrian unit?

Tradition man.
Have you no respect for the tradition of the thing?
I know under the circumstances and all, I’m probably the last person you would want on the other side of that thin line, but… or should that be butt…

Greg Diamond

Posted April 9, 2013 at 1:34 PM

Please, Carl, explain to me the “tradition” of shooting a sandbag at someone’s butt.

You are neither the first nor the last person I would want for any purpose. You have, however, intruded on Cynthia and my slyly humorous pas de deaux. For that reason, I do challenge you to a duel … with Vern.

Thatcher was a staunch supporter of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. He allowed the use of Chile ‘s long range military radar to provide intelligence information to the British during the Falklands war. She also praised him for the economic policies he implemented. When he was arrested in London, she campaigned for his release.

*Falklands…..that was an amazing moment. The Argentine’s stepped into the wrong
rec room with that one. What do they say? You have to do something to be controversial………well, the Iron Lady…had no qualms about “doing something”. She helped Ronnie and got along just fine with Gorby, Helmut…and Byron Mulrooney.
She was a tough “nannie”. Michael Bloomberg…may have learned all his best ideas by watching Baroness Marge…. She did nothing to stop the “Fall of the Wall”.. that is
for sure. So…it maybe why Queen Liz is giving her the complete military honor funeral.
What did they say on Charlie Rose last night: “The greatest woman of the 20th Century”.

I was glad she kicked ass in the Falklands if for no other reason than the side effect of bringing down the Argentine generals who were holding their nation in the grip of terror and torture in the Dirty War. Does that balance off her support for Pinochet? Probably not, since the former was accidental…

“That Margaret Thatcher inspired loathing as well as adoration—that she was what the media habitually call “a divisive figure”—is beyond doubt. But the nature of that loathing is revealing. Its intensity derives not just from opposition to her policies, or even to the fact that she trounced her opponents in three straight elections. It stems from bitterness among the formerly entrenched Left about something more fundamental: a realization that it has lost the argument.”

“Being knee-jerk liberals of the typical European sort, establishment movers and shakers had an instinctive antipathy for her. But the obsessiveness of their hatred had also to do with their own fragile egos—for Thatcher not only didn’t agree with them, she also didn’t care what they thought. Since she was politically terminated by her own party in 1990, those who have always wielded cultural influence in Britain have done their best to strike back. Their narrative of the Thatcher years as a time of shocking social and economic degradation has made some headway.
But it will not take. The public has longer memories than it’s often given credit for. You do not have to be especially old to remember Britain before Thatcher: the accepted, managed decline, the sense that we were living among the ruins, the sordidness of our national landscape. You do not have to be old to recall the sudden, renewed sense of national purpose, the almost palpable sense of coming back from the dead, the dawning realization that Britain was, within the span of a decade, no longer regarded as a tatty afterthought on the world stage, but was once again a serious country.

“And there is this: a genuine admiration, and possibly an increasing nostalgia, for a leader who said what she believed and believed what she said. Even her most implacable enemies have never criticized Thatcher for her political insincerity, for she had none. She was a conviction politician before the term was coined, a leader motivated by a love for Britain and its people and a desire that they should once again achieve the heights she knew them capable of.”

I certainly don’t feel that my side “lost the argument.” I think that she bamboozled people into thinking that selling off government property and giving them a tiny share of the proceeds, while distracting them from what they would lose, was a sound long-term policy. And Britain being a “serious country” again was a function of its working hand-in-glove with some of the worst leaders on the planet, starting with Pinochet.

She was a charlatan — but an incredibly effective one. Most of the admiration towards Reagan more properly belongs to her, as well as a great share of the blame. One of the most charming things about her is the extent to which she held him in contempt for being nowhere near the leader she was.

This was the early 80s she said that, in the midst of working with him as first-term President. You’re admitting Ronnie’s malady was that early-onset, and that the Leader of the Free World you lot deify was the grinning puppet of his nefarious handlers? Well allrighty then!

You missed all the nuances…of geo-politic….but that’s OK…we can’t
all be Henry Kissinger…can we?
The reality was that “Iron Marge or Maggie” if you will….called Reagan out on Grenada …because Grenada was in the English Commonwealth and Reagan should have given her a head’s up….rather than just a notification that “tomorrow we invade”. The 2nd argument was on the Falklands…and Reagan didn’t agree. Maggie said to Reagan: “If it was Alaska……..would your position be the same?” He shut up…..

Maggie also thought Helmut Kohl was full of it…..on German Re-unification. She fought tooth and nail…..but finally gave in.

Let’s just say……..Reagan supported her throughout in spite of the differences. Henry Kissinger was really bugged by her…..because he can’t stand women…..but that’s another story.

I’m going back to your original point in order to point out how ridiculous it is. But that’s a very nice cut and run on your part.

skallywag

Posted April 9, 2013 at 3:38 PM

anon – Debating you is like debating Art Pedroza – like attempting to nail jello to the wall. I didn’t run from anything – we were debating if I implied “universal approval” and I proved that I did not do that. You belong on the Pedroza NSA blog – you might even be Pedroza.

anon

Posted April 9, 2013 at 3:41 PM

The absurdity of your original point is the source of it all. Don’t try and lay that at MY doorstep.

Greg,
I was kidding too, I hope you knew that, but I would take on Vern with the super-soaker!
I still think we could make a really funny video of it at Hillcrest Park.
It might require a few adult beverages, but that’s totally doable too. (_)?
I’ll even bring the peanut butter, for the “Aarron Burr” line at the end…

How did Thatcher do it?
There was an ambivalence if not antipathy to militant trade union bureaucracies and a Labour party whose “reforms” were not working. Thatcher rode a wave of ideological, electoral and organizational demise of organized labor and then danced on its grave – while creating a sense that her reforms would put the Great back into Great Britain.

First John Major, then Blair and now David Cameron entrenched her market-led reforms into every crevice of British society. Recently the Conservative-led coalition implemented welfare reforms that she could only have dreamt about. Thatcher is dead – but Thatcherism is fighting fit – praise the Lord.

Mr. Hughes MP:
There is no doubt that the Prime Minister (Thatcher), in many ways, has achieved substantial success. There is one statistic, however, that I understand is not challenged, and that is that, during her 11 years as Prime Minister, the gap between the richest 10 per cent. and the poorest 10 per cent. in this country has widened substantially. At the end of her chapter of British politics, how can she say that she can justify the fact that many people in a constituency such as mine are relatively much poorer, much less well housed and much less well provided for than they were in 1979? Surely she accepts that that is not a record that she or any Prime Minister can be proud of.

Prime Minister Thatcher responds:
People on all levels of income are better off than they were in 1979. The hon. Gentleman is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. That way one will never create the wealth for better social services, as we have. What a policy. Yes, he would rather have the poor poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. That is the Liberal policy.

Mr. Hughes MP:
No.

Prime Minister Thatcher:
Yes, it came out. The hon. Member did not intend it to, but it did.

If such a disparity allows the wealthy to amass funds sufficient to pervert the political system such that they can then take all of the money from the poor that they want, rendering them even poorer than they were previously, then yes such an increase in aggregate income was bad.

Meanwhile, the Hon. skallywag does not acknowledge that the Prime Minister was, in her first sentence, lying through her teeth, perhaps because the Hon. skallyway does not give a damn.

The very least that can be said about the “Iron Lady” is that when she took over Britain was digging itself deeper and deeper into an abyss – she stopped the digging – and that is an accomplishment in itself.

LONDON (AP) — The BBC is in a bind after opponents of Margaret Thatcher pushed the song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” to the top of the British charts in a posthumous protest over her divisive policies.

so does all of this make it okay for conservatives to throw a party when jimmah carter or billie boy kicks the bucket?
course it’s not quite the same – the Iron Lady was effective – jimmah not so much.

*Amazingly, in London today….they are still trying to “Beat the Dead B…..into oblivion. The folks in South Africa are still going ballistic and the Canadians are mum…….The Aussies are selling Thatcher memoribilia out of the backs of their cars at swap meets…
Wow, the Iron Lady definitely made a lasting impression on the British Empire.